My travels in November - to the tremendously successful annual meetings of the German Dental Association and the Portuguese Dental Association respectively, and to FDI’s headquarters in Geneva - reinforced my confidence that the international dental community is well equipped to embrace the challenges of the future.

Over the course of the last month, my new role as FDI President has already taken me to three different continents where I have been continually impressed and energized by the dedication and expertise of our local members and representatives.

I was honoured to formally take up my position as President of FDI during the World Dental Congress in Madrid in September and am excited by the challenges that lie ahead. To date, FDI has created and sustained programmes important to our members and the people in the countries we serve. We’ve united regions, and achieved financial sustainability. We’ve secured new partnerships, grown our reserves, and ensured that we have the resources we need to accomplish our goal of “leading the world to optimal oral health”.

Before I began my mandate in 2015, I reflected on the best way to keep members up-to-date with FDI work, and what their President was doing to consolidate FDI-NDA relations and advance our goals worldwide. The result of my deliberations was my personal letter to members, delivered into their email inbox every month. It has been a pleasure.

This month I report on my meeting in Astana with the Minister of Health of Kazakhstan and members of the newly-formed FDI national committee for Kazakhstan; my meeting in Mexico City on the role of our federation in the prevention of oral diseases through our advocacy work; a few key event not to miss in Madrid related to World Oral Health Day, the Oral Health Observatory, and a joint session with the NCD Alliance.

On behalf of FDI, I would like to congratulate former Ethiopian Minister of Health, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on his appointment as Director-General (DG) of the World Health Organization (WHO), possibly the most important job in global health. His appointment follows an election process at the 70th World Health Assembly in May and hopefully African Member States can in particular look forward to a boost to health strategy on the African continent during the new DGs five-year mandate.

March is always an exciting period for new initiatives at FDI - increasingly so since 2013, when we began celebrating World Oral Health Day (WOHD) on 20 March. Early results from our Live Mouth Smart campaign in 2017 are very encouraging, showing that the reach of our awareness raising efforts is growing. I was also so pleased to be the first FDI President to celebrate WOHD in Africa.

The Middle-East has been one of my focal points during the past few weeks, with events in Aswan (Egypt), Dubai (United Arab Emirates). More recently, I was in Chicago, for the Leadership Meeting of the American Dental Association (ADA) and, crucially, a strategy workshop for the Executive Board.

For my first Letter of 2017, I would like to express my confidence that FDI can keep up the momentum of 2016 in all aspects of its work. We have a number of exciting campaigns, projects and events underway, which will serve to once again enhance the reputation of FDI as the go-to organization for oral health worldwide.

My recent visits to the Japan and Germany Dental Associations left me well briefed on the priorities, activities and achievements of our member organizations and I am happy to confirm that we continue to enjoy excellent working relations. In Japan, I also addressed and participated in anniversary events with a key partner GC Corporation.

Thanks to perfect organization and logistics, FDI’s Poznan congress lived up to our high expectations and turned out to be a watershed moment for world dentistry. It established international consensus on how to define oral health, which has serious implications for FDI’s vision of ‘Leading the world to optimal oral health’.

It is heartening to report that FDI's good form continues unabated, with our recent Mid-Year Meetings demonstrating the commitment of Council and the Standing Committees to work together to reach the goals our Federation has set for the coming years - and, above all, communicate their activities.

Creating the building blocks for oral health strategy is a question of meeting and discussing issues of concern with local dental associations. This was my aim in meetings in Lebanon and Senegal in early and mid-October. The first took me to Beirut on 8 October.

There I had the opportunity to meet and exchange views with presidents from dental associations in Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen as well as from the Palestinian Dental Association and the Union of Palestinian Dentists in Lebanon.